UP Govt Officials to Get Tablet PCs

After providing over 50,000 laptops free of cost to intermediate-pass students in the state, the Akhilesh Yadav government has now come up with the idea of providing thousands of tablet PCs to its burgeoning army of revenue officials...

LUCKNOW: After providing over 50,000 laptops free of cost to intermediate-pass students in the state, the Akhilesh Yadav government has now come up with the idea of providing thousands of tablet PCs to its burgeoning army of revenue officials, including lekhpals and tehsildars. The move is aimed at streamlining the governance process in general and revenue records in particular. It will also bring revenue officials -- right from tehsildars to lekhpals -- under the government's watchful eyes so that all work carried out by them can be monitored by their immediate supervisor.

"The moment a citizen applies for any service of the revenue department, it will reach the lowest field functionary of the department," said Anil Kumar , commissioner and secretary, Board of Revenue.

"In the same fashion, the report and all actions of the respective functionary will be carried back to the citizens electronically. While cutting delays, it will also simplify the task of the functionary and make the process of monitoring the services time-bound, automatic and virtually effortless."

About the economics of the proposed move, Kumar said, "The cost incurred in providing tablet PCs to nearly 30,000 officials will be around Rs 30 crore." He said between Rs 10 lakh and Rs 20 lakh might be spent in developing the relevant software to run the tablet PCs. "It may take nearly six months to make the software relevant and user-friendly," he said.

Asked whether the software will be designed by the National Informatics Centre or a private firm, Kumar said "as of now, both the options are open" . "At present we are focusing on developing the best possible software to deal with the huge amount of data ," he said. "The tablet PCs will increase the accountability of the lekhpals, and steps will be taken to ensure that they do not misuse the tablet PCs [for] playing games on the internet, etc."